Vim has a simple way to jump to the corresponding opening or closing parenthesis: %. Your cursor will effortlessly bounce from closing to opening or vice versa.

This works for other types of braces and brackets as well. When positioned on one of a pair of [], {}, or (), simply press the percent key % to jump the cursor to the matching opening or closing character. Vim calls these matchpairs.

You can see what pairs of characters Vim knows about by inspecting the matchpairs attribute with :set matchpairs. This can vary from buffer to buffer depending on the filetype. In the case of a Markdown file my current config shows:

matchpairs=(:),{:},[:],<:>

You may notice that the corresponding character your cursor moves to is already highlighted by Vim before jumping. That’s because Vim includes a standard plugin called matchparen, which will highlight the matching parens.

If for some strange reason you don’t like this functionality, you can disable it with simply:

:NoMatchParen

Or enable it if it’s already disabled:

:DoMatchParen

For more information, such as how to change the colors, see :help matchparen.